Tag: Nagorno Karabakh

The long cordial relations between the United States and Azerbaijan (since the dissolution of the Soviet Union at least) have lately taken some interesting twists and turns, Stephen Karganovich writes.

In the April 11 Voice of America piece «What's Hiding Behind Russia's calls for Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh», Paul Goble claims that Russia is manipulating the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, in an effort to gain a greater allegiance from fossil fuel rich Azerbaijan. This view comes across as a dubious conspiracy theory…

The sudden aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh is fraught with serious consequences. The warring sides, as well as the OSCE (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) Minsk Group, have to realize that the situation may get out of hand and entail irreversible consequences against the will of the belligerents…

The past few days have seen a string of serious incidents in the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Heavy fighting involving artillery, tanks and aircraft broke out on the contact line between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh early on Saturday, April 2…

The NATO allies have flatly refused to side with Turkey in its conflict with Russia. Now Ankara is urgently looking for new opportunities to boost its influence in the region and divert the Russia’s attention making it face other «fronts». Turkey has no time to lose as the relations with Moscow may deteriorate further. It makes Ankara hastily take steps to enhance its energy security, establish a coalition of Turkic states it has been fostering for a long time and complicate the situation in the Caucasus to make Moscow face more problems there…

Several days ago Richard Morningstar, the U.S. Ambassador in Baku, made a statement in an interview with the Azerbaijani office of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty of a sort which diplomats do not usually dare to make. The American suggested that one of the lessons Baku should learn from the events in Ukraine is that the Maidan could repeat itself in Azerbaijan… The American diplomat's statement regarding the possibility of an «Azerbaijani Maidan» should be considered together with the previous speech of James Warlick, the U.S. Co-Chair of the Minsk Group on the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The speech took place May 7 at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington. The ideas expressed by Warlick – and he unambiguously suggested retuning the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to the situation at the end of the 1980s – was received very frostily in Yerevan…

The Foreign Ministerial meeting of Non-aligned Movement last week and its pronouncements particularly in the context of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has revived the old debate whether the body can actually play an effective role in international politics or pass into oblivion as an antediluvian body that emerged as an alternate to bloc politics during the cold war…

The initiative to reform the European security architecture – and consequently that of the OSCE – should be credited to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev who proposed back in 2008 a new European security treaty aimed at creating the continent's integrated and indivisible security space. In Astana, Medvedev's initiative upgraded to the Euro-Asian level was upheld by Kazakh president N. Nazarbayev who invoked an idea “to form a single security space bound by four oceans: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Arctic to the Indian”…